The movement in Egypt was said to be “very dependent on Facebook,” according to an Egyptian blogger and activist Alaa Abd El Fattah who was quoted in the Washington Post. Fueled by the anger over high food prices and high unemployment, the citizen’s communications strategy went beyond social media.

Collective Intelligence expert, Don Tapscott, wrote in HuffPo about Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s attempt to maintain a “firm grip” on the country’s media, which was ultimately lost due to the “interactive and decentralized” power of the web.

ReadWriteWeb noted that even when 90% of Egyptian internet access points were shut down by major ISPs, the coordination of “old-style” dial up connections helped maintain communications throughout the country.

It is late. I woke up thinking about how technology makes things so convenient and how we steadily input more and more of it into our lives. A certain amount of convenience is nice but when everything is micro-packaged we think it means we should consume more of it. We eat more fast food because it steals less time from our day that we could be spending with our child. We “scan” RSS and twitter feeds while sipping on a 40 oz. diet coke. We get frustrated when there is no wi-fi in a building because we need to check our e-mail, now! The way we consume is hyper-accelerated. We get stressed out. We get sick.

This is not happening everywhere in the world. This blog hopes to examine how other cultures incorporate technology into their already existent value systems. I hope that we will learn the value in slowing down. I already wrote about the “slow family,” which I believe is a good place to begin a more conscious lifestyle with less stress. The world – out there – will take some time to slow down, but you can begin to become aware of the subtleties, flavors, and joys of taking it a notch down, while at home.

“Family” is a powerful word. It carries much more weight than “community” and certainly more weight than “culture.”

In this blog I explore a concept I call the “slow family”. This idea stems from the slow movement.

Most, post-modern families have subjective values, undefined roles, and their lifestyles tend to be more concerned with extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic motivation. They celebrate each others materialistic achievements because they matter the most. Extrinsic motivation is about fulfilling tangible cravings and rewards. Intrinsic motivation is more concerned with personal development, demonstrating personality in ways both creative and productive. We all know that young children are highly suggestible. They are also highly insatiable.